Bones pulled up by fisherman may be victim of 10-year-old Air Force crash.

A Eureka fishing boat pulled up a T-shirt full of bones from the ocean floor off Punta Gorda on Monday. They are believed to be the remains of one of 10 men killed in the crash of an HC-130P Air Force Reserve cargo plane in 1996.

The trawler scooped up a flight suit while fishing, but threw it overboard because the crew did not recognize it as a flight suit at the time, said Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager. It then pulled up the surprisingly well-preserved black T-shirt, which apparently held the bones from the victim’s torso for nearly 10 years.

”This is a pretty good recovery for being on the ocean floor for so long,” Jager said.

Also recovered was a name tag, with “Leonard” visible on it. Jonathan Leonard was one of the reservists who died in the ill-fated flight King 56.

The plane plunged into the ocean about 40 miles off Cape Mendocino on Nov. 22, 1996, after all four of its engines failed. Only one man, Tech. Sgt. Robert T. Vogel, 31, from Albany, Ore., survived, despite spending nearly three hours in the frigid water before being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The coroner’s office picked up the bones from the boat Tuesday, but its captain asked the office not to release the name of the captain or the boat, Jager said.

A major recovery effort by the U.S. Navy was conducted at the time of the crash, pressed by two Oregon lawmakers. A year later, seven civil cases were filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., against Lockheed Martin and Allision Engines Corp., which built the plane and its engine.

The cases were settled in 2001, after significant difficulties on behalf of plaintiffs’ attorneys, who wrestled with several provisions of law because of where the crash occurred. The terms of the settlement are confidential.

In a phone interview with the Times-Standard, Portland attorney Keith Tichenor said the Death on the High Seas Act and a provision called the Ferris Doctrine — which prevents service members on active duty from suing the military — complicated the case.

Tichenor said the Navy conducted extensive undersea surveys to assemble a defense against Lockheed and Allison, and in the process identified the remains of several of the victims on the ocean floor.

”It was a very strange and mysterious event that was reconstructed from what was collected off the ocean floor,” Tichenor said.

Attempts to contact the survivor, Vogel, were unsuccessful. However, a transcript from Vogel’s testimony to the Air Force Accident Board was found.

”. . . The sequence of events is very fuzzy,” Vogel said. “We started losing all of the engines. The engines started dropping off line. And I remember standing up behind Brant. By this time it’s all pitch black outside; there is no lights outside the aircraft at all. I am standing up. I look over the navigator’s position. All the lights go off. The skins panel comes up with testing. And at this time, I know — I said, ‘We’re (expletive). The airplane’s going to crash.’”

He described panicked crew members hitting switches, and the first engine that gave them trouble was shut down. And then all of the engines went off.

Vogel saw them repeatedly try to start the engines as he sent out Maydays.

”I transmitted a Mayday — every 30 seconds,” Vogel said. “It was just the general format, ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is King 56. We’re an Air Force C-130. We’ve lost all four engines. If you hear my station, please contact the Coast Guard Station Humboldt Bay and have somebody get airborne.’”

The crew donned survival suits and the pilots couldn’t see the water when they hit.

”When I hit, my body went forward and I went down,” Vogel said. “My headset came off. Glass, water come shooting by me.”

He said he tried to get out of the water but realized his back was broken, and he called out for any other survivors.

”There was a flashing beacon out in the water,” Vogel said. “I wanted to get over toward the beacon, but I couldn’t move because I felt my back was broken. I called out a number of times, ‘Is anybody out there?’ at the top of my lungs. On two separate occasions, I heard. ‘I’m over here.’ I heard that twice and I never heard it again, so I am assuming that somebody else was alive after the accident.”

Vogel said he heard a ship in the water about 30 minutes after the impact.

”You know, it was probably 150 feet away from me,” Vogel said. “And I was screaming at the top of my lungs and they had lights going in the water, so they were searching for something. And I screamed and screamed and screamed. They never heard me. They went right by me.”